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An anonymous reader notes that Hotmail's full version doesn't work with Firefox 3. Users get the following message when they try to log in: You are temporarily on the classic version of Windows Live Hotmail due to an error encountered during login. Before trying again, please clear your cache and cookies. (Clearing cache and cookies doesn't fix it.) At least 8 other bug reports have been duped to this one. The fault apparently lies with the Hotmail site, not Mozilla — maintainer Dave Garrett assigned the bug to Tech Evangelism, explaining: "I'll... move this over to TE, as my guess is this [is] the site's fault (just bad user agent sniffing?)."

This is the classic version of Windows Live HotmailThis version works better with your browser. The full version of Windows Live Hotmail runs on Internet Explorer 6.0 and higher (make sure you check the system requirements before you install it). The full version also works on Firefox 1.5.

And the option to switch between Classic and Full is gone from the Options, etc... and my moms a whore...so what...

IE comes with MSN as the default page and has links to tons of Microsoft products and services whereas Firefox leans away from most Microsoft-based sites. I'm sure these bugs will be fixed eventually... but I'm also pretty sure Microsoft wasn't too worried about launching Hotmail without Firefox support.

Firefox is basically funded by google. You know how the default search engine is google it is because google donates and promotes firefox. Not to mention the firefox "homepage" is google. Firefox received about 66 million dollars in 2006.

http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2007/10/22/beyond-sustainability/

Which is fine because they publicly state that. Almost all of the money they make, besides the occasional donation is from google. The mozilla foundation is funded by google.

I'm sure these bugs will be fixed eventually... but I'm also pretty sure Microsoft wasn't too worried about launching Hotmail without Firefox support.

How long they take to fix it depends on whether they feel people are more likely to change their browser to fix a problem accessing their email, or change to a different email provider. While it's a great deal easier to change to a compatible browser it's not a foregone conclusion that people will necessarily take that route, especially if they're trying Firefox because they're dissatisfied with IE - if they're already trying to defect from the MSFT camp then a problem with Hotmail on FF3 will drive them further away.

That pretty much says it all about how much MS fears the law. What's one more potentially criminal antitrust abuse? The courts are so slow and punishments so weak, why would they even bother worrying about breaking the law?

If you use Safari, eventually the site saves your info to the cache - even if you ask for it not to save your username or password. Once your info is in Safari's cache, loading hotmail.com to try to log in gets you into an infinite loop bouncing between a couple of addresses. You have to stop the loading, go empty the cache of everything from live.com, and reload hotmail.com. Perhaps some of the fault is Apple's, but I've never had that problem with any other website while using Safari.

WebCT's replacement, Blackboard, is orders of magnitude worse than WebCT. If you click the logo in Blackboard, it opens a new window with a new login screen. It also won't let you open new windows in tabs because you can't be signed in more than once. It's also very unstable and quite unintuitive.

It also has javascript blocking *NIX file paths unless the useragent contains "mac". It worked before and might be fixed now, though. I don't see why they don't check that a file was actually received, you can enter a path to a non-existent file and it will report a successful upload. My university also has passwords sent in base64 for some reason, but that might be just an issue with them.
Although I don't see the other issues you mention. IIRC, I've always been able to open up pages in a new tab without i

If you ever manage to login (hint: get rid of those hotmail, passport, live cookies), it will suggest you to use "Internet Explorer" for full site. On OS X!At least in Turkish version, it happens to a friend.

True. That said, if you are stuck in the infinite loop, though, you don't have to go clear your cache to be able to log in. You can just go to the main MSN portal, and since that site recognizes that you're still logged in, it will show you a "sign out" link instead. Just log out, and go back to the Hotmail site, and will let you log in again. Not ideal, but better than clearing caches.

People thinking it is accidental or modding you flamebait also thinks MS really wants to give.NET functionality to Linux via Mono project and Novell deal.Yes, everyone on earth tried how their page looks with Firefox 3 but MS didn't. Lets believe that.

Same behavior in Konqueror(3.5.9). Well, actually, the default Konqueror UA isn't recognized as compatible with the full version interface; but spoofing either an IE or an FF UA changes that. With the spoof in place, the page exhibits the same behavior as described with FF3

So, this problem isn't caused by straight discrimination based on UA string, since spoofing IE had no effect. Something about the website is clearly wonky, though I can't say whether or not KHTML is to blame.

My father. I was planning to update his laptop with FF3 when he comes back from his annual trip to Alaska, but he's been using Hotmail for his email for quite a while and it would be a real hassle to get him to change it. He's 80 years old and doesn't like to change things.

My father. I was planning to update his laptop with FF3 when he comes back from his annual trip to Alaska, but he's been using Hotmail for his email for quite a while and it would be a real hassle to get him to change it. He's 80 years old and doesn't like to change things.

That's fine then because the "classic" Hotmail still works fine it's the new and improved (changed) version that doesn't work with FF3.

As much as I hate anecdotal "evidence" for things, I can say that I just cleared my junk mail from a full Windows Live mail account (it was Hotmail until they forced me to move it over) just before I came to slashdot. In Firefox 3. No problems. I've never seen that message.

That being said, I also have SUSE, and it occurred to me perhaps there is some special deal going on there to allow it to work fine. But if not, I can't see any good reason to blame Mozilla or Microsoft; the bug was filed with Firefox 3 still in beta, perhaps it was an un-updated extension or the like interfering?

In 80's and 90's everyone was like "get a compatible" meaning get a PC with DOS or Windows. Now it seems like Microsoft is the incompatible company! Examples: Internet Explorer not standards compliant, Vista not compatible with many business applications that ran well on XP, MS Office not supporting ODF...
Does this mean that Microsoft is going down the same path as Commodore and OS/2?

Who cares about hotmail anyway? Isn't that the obnoxious service which adds advertisements to all the mails sent by their users? (And most users not being aware that they are sending spam at the bottom of the mails they write.)

Well, in fact Yahoo does the same thing. Strange that the MS/Yahoo deal didn't work out. As far as treating their email service users, they seem to behave the same.

Yahoo lets Safari 3, Opera 9.5, Firefox 2 (3 has documented issue) users to use their (New) Yahoo Mail and (Beta) My Yahoo. They are way complex and beyond anything those MSCE monkeys could code BTW. My Yahoo beta is essentially a full feature RSS reader masked as a webpage.

I don't see any comparison between Yahoo and Hotmail really. It could only serve to get idea about what would happen if MS really acquired Yahoo.

Um, not if IE is using non-standard js, that isn't supported in Firefox. I think that's kinda the problem. Hotmail's code for Firefox doesn't work because MS broke it, and the IE js isn't compliant.

What are you suggesting here? That Microsoft went out of their way to find some exact combination of Javascript functions that:1) Works in IE2) Works in FF23) But doesn't work in FF34) Was installed before any FF3 betas were around (since this has been reported for every version of FF3.)

Because they can't dare to mess with Microsoft giant like a little Norwegian company did?

Opera sued them big time for messing around with their application along with releasing a dedicated "Bork edition" release which is a legend already

1) Stuff like this is why you look at the served HTML.

2) You do realize that the 'margin' setting on the MSN style sheets that caused the problem with Opera was either a stupid MSN programmer doing something NOT MSN, or was a very simple accident, since the margin number it received was from a 'calculation'.

MSN is NOT Microsoft, you would be surprised how separate the businesses operate, and isolating Opera users with a messed up page would NOT benefit MSN.

Some interesting MSN info:The MSN datacenter managers and site programmers are borderline retarded having worked with them directly, I would bet on it being an accident and wouldn't be surprised if there aren't tons of coding errors that hit all browsers independantly.

The MSN managers and programmers are the reason Microsoft 'Live' exists, and why MSN groups and other MSN features are all in competition with Live and being replaced by Live services from Microsoft's other divisions OUTSIDE of MSN. MSN is a held over tie to a time when MSN was a folder based compuserve type service and tried to adopt to being a portal site.

Notice that everything from Windows Messenger to even search moved from the MSN teams and was replaced. All Microsoft products shove live.com as the default home page, not MSN.com.

If you ever want to see a day in insanity, go hang out with the MSN datacenter people. I feel sorry for sites like Slate.com, etc that have to work through their operations.

I worked with another 'partner' like Slate and dealing with the MSN people scared the fek out of myself and my team. We even had to fix programming for them and send them instructions for their servers because an 'ok' manager at MSN said his people didn't know how to do something really simple and asked if we would do it for him on the side. Scary...

Secureserver.com (Godaddy's email service) has started rejecting logins if you're using Opera.I don't mind a warning, but for God's sake let me just take my chances, would you? Now I have to switch to Firefox to check mail--fucking retarded.

Hey, I've got an idea--instead of serving custom pages by sniffing user agents, why not make a single set of code that works everywhere? I mean, I know it's horrible to contemplate--but I'm really not interested in your fancy Ajax interface or toys that try t

The account management page [live.com] doesn't work either, the sections just sit on loading forever (why do they use scripting for this anyway?). Thus giving no way to, say, change your password.Billing [microsoft.com] still works. Still no way to remove a credit card without adding another, though.

I mean setting user agent to IE/windows helped.. However later they added some extra code, and even blocked that. The only way I could bank then, was by downloading the login page and editing it to remove the IE/Windows detection bit.. And guess what ? I could enter and use the rest of the site no problems whatsoever..

Great that you solved it, even so; in a geeky way. However you should have called them and demanded they'd support firefox and linux and yadda yadda or threaten to switch bank. Just as people with hotmail trouble should do this to MSN. In case they don't listen: switch mail provider. Gmail still supports firefox.

However later they added some extra code, and even blocked that. The only way I could bank then, was by downloading the login page and editing it to remove the IE/Windows detection bit.. And guess what ? I could enter and use the rest of the site no problems whatsoever..

Not to excuse them for having a crappy site, but do you know for sure that you weren't breaking their terms of service by doing this? With most sites I wouldn't care, but in the case of Internet Banking I might be tempted to just find an alternative bank that did agree to support my browser.

For all you know, the reason they were trying to block Firefox might have been because they knew of a bug that would mis-interpret your banking instructions. (eg. If you told it to pay someone on 6/7/2008, it might be sent by the browser as 7/6/2008.)

If you'd knowingly worked around their efforts to block your browser from using their banking interface, and then they'd lost your money, you might not have much of a legal standing to fall back on.

Not everyone reads Slashdot. Most people who use Hotmail don't necessarily know or care that it is a Microsoft service, or think everything in the computing world was designed by Microsoft. I recently overheard a discussion in the library about Tim Berners Lee and how he was the guy who invented "the Internet" (He really invented the web, which is not the same thing as almost all of us here know, but the better illustration of my point is coming.) What did his friend say?: "I though Bill Gates invented the internet." I was too busy trying to keep from puking to point out that Gates not only did not invent the Internet, but actually originally said the Internet was just a fad.

Some of us signed up with Hotmail before Microsoft acquired it, or haven't felt inconvenienced enough to switch. I only use it for site registrations anyway, I've got my own domain for my 'real' email.

Been there since 1996. It had everything I loved at the time, it was fast free and BSD. It didn't even attempt to start your chat client when you logged in to check your mail!

It all went downhill after MS bought them. The first thing that happened was they decided to replace the existing and working infrastructure with MS servers running IIS and of course the hardware requirements went up and reliability went down. There are rumors that they haven't been able to fully complete the process to this day and that somewhere at hotmail some BSD machines are still running, but I'm skeptical of that.

And here I sit, like the husband who stays with his unfaithful wife for the kids. Except this is just a mail server rather than a wife and there are no kids involved, so I guess that's not a very good analogy, but God damn it, hotmail will die before I give up that email address.... or they start charging $ for it.

If I ever won enough money to buy the domain, I would start my own mail service and put a graphic on the main page depicting Beastie pitchforking Ballmer with a caption that says "I fear that there are no chairs here, biatch!"

Alright.. my way back story is that not only did I use hotmail before MS took em over, but after they took em over, me and my family members (who at the time were ICQ users) checked out out MSN Messenger which had the hotmail tie-in.. and long story short we have all been Messenger/Hotmail ever since.. And it's just became too much trouble to get everyone to switch to a different IM client. (although I use aMSN linux client it's still MSN network)

I've had my hotmail account since what about 1996, GeoCities too. Geocities was my first shot at web pages on the WWW (previously only on intranet). Curiously the most recent permutations of those pages still exist! Apparently I moved to CSS in 2001.

Can't imagine who looks at those pages now, but Yahoo is paying for the server. The stats package moved from NedStat to someone I never even heard of, wonder if I can still find a login?

I've just had a snoop around GeoCities and can date the early content t

While I don't use Hotmail as my main account (haven't for quite a while), I still use it. And Firefox. No, nobody installed it for me. I am the go-to guy for tech and science (etc, etc, etc.) And I don't have any trouble getting into Hotmail (full) at all.:)

I do for one, I created it when I first got on the net and have never had a problem with it so never needed to change. And since most of my friends use MSN to chat online I need an address for that anyway. I see no conflict of any kind, hotmail works and does its job as do my non-M$ browsers.

You do realise that Outlook Web Access actually does rely on some IE only stuff right? Specifically, it uses a non-standard HTTP verb (SUBSCRIBE), they still haven't moved from using the old XMLHTTP ActiveX control to the new XMLHttpRequest (you can probably forgive them for being slow on the uptake there - they probably can't believe it ever took off - nothing Microsoft invents takes off!), and I imagine some of the Javascript is quite funky too (the "You have new e-mail" popup appears OVER other programs